SQL Server Magazine

SQLsafe
Like SQL Backup, Idera’s SQLsafe is part of its own suite of SQL Server tools. You can use its management tool, a command-line utility, or extended stored procedures for backup and restoration. SQLsafe’s point-in-time slider can help you restore to a specific point (assuming you have the proper set of backups available) and, like HyperBac for SQL Server and SQL Backup, includes a utility for converting backups you make with SQLsafe to a native SQL Server backup. SQLsafe also has the unique option to restore a single table. Idera offers a free version of SQLsafe called SQLsafe Freeware that has limited functionality and seems to be geared toward small, nonenterprise environments.

Installing Idera’s SQLsafe reminded me a bit of my experience with LiteSpeed for SQL Server—I had to click through a lot of screens to set it up. SQLsafe configures and uses a management database, so you need to have an instance of SQL Server for it to use. Neither HyperBac for SQL Server nor SQL Backup has this requirement. If you use SQLsafe, you’ll need to make sure that the instance powering it is highly available.

One problem with the management database approach—or at least the approach as SQLsafe implements it—is that backups and restores you make outside of SQLsafe don’t seem to be recorded in the management database. The difficulty with this approach is obvious: If a DBA generates any kind of backup outside of SQLsafe, doing so could break the log sequence number (LSN) chain, and SQLsafe will know nothing about it. Idera is making a dangerous assumption that once you’ve installed SQLsafe, no DBA in your environment will ever make a backup outside of SQLsafe. This approach also emphasizes the necessity of making the instance on which SQLsafe runs highly available.

SQLsafe supports different forms of encryption but doesn’t specify whether the level is 128-bit or 256-bit. Idera includes a tool for converting SQLsafe’s backup to a standard SQL Server backup format. SQLsafe also has a command-line utility to perform backups and restores outside of SQL Server and the SQLsafe tool. SQLsafe offers six options for compression: four numbered levels and optimizing Idera’s IntelliCompress technology for either size or speed. Of the three tools I tested, SQLsafe has the greatest number of compression options.

SQLsafe uses a service and doesn’t install extended stored procedures into an instance by default. If you run backup jobs with scripts and don’t want to use the service, the extended stored procedures that would allow you to script SQLsafe backups aren’t installed by default, so they’d need to be installed on each instance where the scripts would run, then you’d need to change your scripts (as you would if you used SQL Backup’s extended stored procedures). One problem is that the only place the different options that the extended stored procedures use are documented is in the sample scripts Idera provides. This isn’t optimal, and it was also a little sloppy—the version of SQLsafe listed in the scripts was the one previous to the version I tested. Even if the scripts are the same in both versions, I would have thought Idera would update the sample scripts to reflect the version of the product that was installed.

I wasn’t impressed by SQLsafe’s management tool. The UI reminds me of Outlook, and I didn’t find its workflow to be as intuitive as the one in SQL Backup. I did like how it showed the progress of an operation as a percentage, which is more useful than SQL Backup’s display of progress in gigabytes.

SQLsafe lets you set a backup policy across multiple servers. I didn’t test this capability across different physical servers, but my test server was running two instances of SQL Server 2005. SQLsafe doesn’t have the ability to customize the backup path for each instance when you set a backup policy, which means all backups will go to the same location. An Idera representative told me that a future version of SQLsafe will rectify this situation and that you can modify the behavior in the current version by using macros. However, this workaround isn’t obvious to anyone who wants to be up and running with SQLsafe quickly.

I have the same gripe with SQLsafe’s management tool that I did with SQL Backup: You can manage your backups but not your restores outside of one-time-only restores. SQLsafe provides utilities for importing maintenance plans into the SQLsafe repository. One curious omission: I saw no provision for importing regular SQL Server Agent jobs. A bigger problem is that as I tried to run the tool for importing a maintenance plan, I got the message “ALLANX64\INS2 is SQL Server 2005 or greater which is not supported.” I didn’t see any documentation to tell me that the feature doesn’t work with SQL Server 2005.

The Tool That’s Right for You
When it comes to disaster recovery, refreshing a development server with new data, or any operation that requires a restore, time is money. All three tools both sped up and compressed backups and had faster restore times than native SQL Server operations. Time spent backing up and compressing the backup was similar among all three products. HyperBac for SQL Server and SQL Backup had similar times for a restore operation; although SQLsafe’s restore time was faster than a native SQL Server restore, it was considerably slower than the other two products’ restore times. (To read more about my compression testing, see the sidebar “Compression Testing and Results.”)

HyperBac for SQL Server is available with a per-server license model and also has the lowest list price without reduced functionality. Imagine that you are administering 100 instances. If you spread those instances over 65 physical servers, the list-price comparison among the products would be $99,500 for SQLsafe, $51,675 for SQL Backup Pro, and $43,875 for HyperBac for SQL Server. Despite the cost differential, Idera deserves credit for not requiring a license for the SQLsafe agent on instances that are performing only restores, which is perfect for disaster recovery.

Where workflow is concerned, HyperBac for SQL Server is at the top of the list based on the way most DBAs I know like to work. Although it doesn’t ship with a management tool for backups, it works with whatever tool you have. As I’ve noted, a big part of the pain of tool adoption is the cost of implementation. HyperBac wins hands down on this point because it lets you get up and running in short order. But if you’re managing a lot of SQL Server backups and want the full complement of GUI, management tool, and the ability to use the command line or scripts via extended stored procedures, either SQL Backup or SQLsafe might be better bets for you. Both these products have a management tool that is geared toward environments with multiple SQL servers. Neither management tool is perfect, but either might do a better job for you than managing your backups in each instance with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).

Both SQLsafe and SQL Backup were more cumbersome to install than HyperBac for SQL Server, involving multiple steps such as pushing components out to SQL servers after the initial install. HyperBac for SQL Server’s install could become part of a standard Windows build process so that it’s already in place by the time a DBA gets a new server.

All three tools offer similar performance in compression, so an ultimate purchasing decision boils down to the other features and functionality a tool brings to the table and how it can benefit your own backup and restore administration. I found SQL Backup and SQLsafe both slightly disappointing; neither features the ability to set restore policies or lets you manage regularly scheduled restores. In enterprise-class tools, these are glaring omissions. Using the cost example of 100 instances, if you compare according to price and feature set, is SQLsafe approximately two times better than either SQL Backup or HyperBac for SQL Server? In my opinion, the answer is no. Both HyperBac for SQL Server and SQL Backup Pro represent good value, and each takes a different approach. If I were in the market for a SQL Server backup compression tool, I’d choose HyperBac for SQL Server, and that’s why I’ve designated it my Editor’s Choice. But I recommend that you audition the tools that appeal to you and make your own informed choice.

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